I realize growing up as a child that there were times when the physician in my father got the best of him. The Hippocratic Oath he had taken to become a doctor at times transferred to other passions he had, such as the art of growing zoysia grass in our front yard. Dad believed with enough care and skill, he could germinate a strain of grass that would be so attractive that my brother and I would want to set up a permanent camp outside.
“Hey boys,” he started one morning at the breakfast table, “How would you guys like to set up a little camp out in the front yard?”
“WOW Dad! Do you really mean it?!” We were ecstatic.
“Sure. Why not? You could come in to use the restroom of course.”
“Would we be able to set fire to the lawn in the Fall like always? We could watch The Zoysia for you all the time!” Gary added, reaching for a piece of burnt toast.
And so, the enriching atmosphere in our family grew at a voracious rate, like the zoysia creeping slowly across America. For example, a long zoysia runner I noticed on the way to school one morning had grown all the way up the block and was there to meet me in the boulevard as I walked home the same day. This was my father’s dream, the Hippocratic Oath lived out on God’s ever-greener zoysia earth.
Other pledges were being acted out around my father as well, as our entire neighborhood appeared to be on the verge of burning to the ground. Local fathers lined up like tin soldiers, rakes in hand, monitoring burning piles of leaves along the street curb. A fire truck had pulled up as a safety precaution, but seemingly had no interest in any of the nearby blazes. Instead, Mr. Brooks, the fire chief, looking down from his cab, had engaged my father in long conversation about his recent urinary problems and the history of kidney stones in his family. Nearby, the Civil Defense Committee was alive and well, having hunkered down on the front porch of our city’s leading leaf-burning zealot, Miss Crenshaw, whose landmark Even-Odd ordinance had made absolutely no difference in when responsible men burned their leaves.
It was also apparent that the committee’s burn ordinance had not made any difference in the destructive nature of fire itself. As a chunk of blazing zoysia came off Gary’s whiffed tee shot from across the street, its trajectory was in line with Miss Crenshaw’s front porch, and there wasn’t an ordinance this side of the Mississippi that could have stopped it. Gary’s shot may have been a slice, it may have been a fade, but golf vocabulary aside, every head turned as the flaming zoysia fireball arced across the street like a red-hot rainbow.
“HOOOOOLY COW!” said Mr. Brooks the fire chief.
“YIKES!” I yelled running after the firebomb it as if it were a puppy.
“That’s my boy!” said my dad, raising both arms up as if Gary had just won the PGA championship.
Yet Nancy, sweet-as-they-come-Nancy, the girl who had not been able to take her eyes off Gary, was so dazzled she had to grab the fence post for support – utterly committed to a relationship with a rising star in golf pyrotechnics. Never mind that Gary could be convicted of petty arson at any moment or that Nancy might be spending a lot of weekends visiting Gary in prison. She was, in every sense of the word, enchanted and utterly smitten.
Gary, taking advantage of the thrill of victory, walked over and politely opened the gate for her, escorting her through the Land of Burning Zoysia and handed her a nine-iron.
“Let me show you how this is done,” Gary said nonchalantly, and through a series of smooth romantic moves, positioned Nancy so that he could wrap his arms around her in preparation for a golf lesson.
“First you have to grip the handle like this,” Gary said, speaking softly, while Nancy, not caring one thing about a grip, simply stared into Gary’s eyes as if her world had gone celestial.
“Ok, no, like…yea, that’s it, ok, you got it, now, bend your knees a little,” Gary instructed ever so gently, and step by step, half-instructed half-carried her through a textbook golf swing. Within one or two tries, Nancy was swinging wildly herself, mostly missing, but still sending a respectable number of zoysia patches over the fence. Together, as Gary also began to attack the whiffle balls, the two became a match made in zoysia heaven.
Of course, Gary had already hit dead center underneath a wall of decorative crape paper on Miss Crenshaw’s porch, sending flames racing up to her gutter where more leaves awaited incineration.
“FIRE!! FIRRRRRRE!!” Came screams from inside, as members of the Civil Defense Committee stampeded out onto Miss Crenshaw’s lawn. Fireman from the idling Engine 99 fell off the truck like paratroopers and escorted coughing men and well-dressed ladies out to the curb where they were met by men stoking their leaf fires in the street. Mr. Brooks became over excited in the mayhem, soiling his uniform in a heartbreaking nervous bladder incident, resulting in another emergency firetruck being called for a fresh pair of fire-retardant overalls and his urinary retention medicine.
Naturally, one of the locals, probably living in an even numbered house, had notified the local news, who were now winding their way up the street in a Humvee. The producer/reporter/camera stiff, anxious to get the story had jumped off before detaching his seventy-five-foot antenna and was being dragged through small brush fires, prompting a 911 call for an ambulance. That night, on the ten o’clock news, footage of the chaotic and lawless scene, taken by a second-rate backup crew showed footage of my father swatting glowing embers a little too vigorously off of Miss Crenshaw’s chest.
Upheaval notwithstanding, Gary and Nancy, still traded love swings back and forth, were oblivious to anything but who could send the next chunk of Zoysia the farthest. To that end, the two lovebirds had succeeded in hitting nine adjacent lawns with fertile zoysia chunks, and as if love could have gotten any sweeter, a soft rain had begun to fall that engulfed Gary and Nancy in their own private love bubble.
For everyone else, however, the rain doused tempers and a modicum of civility returned, enough so that the fire department, the news anchor team and all other law-abiding citizens were able to return to their homes. The next day, as is typical in the Midwest, a sudden snowstorm blew in and replaced our neighborhoods scorched earth chaos with a blanket of unblemished white snow.
Peace had been restored, and with it, the seedlings of love embedded in uprooted patches of zoysia settled in for a long winter’s nap, safe in their secret hideaways until Spring rains awakened their greedy fingers and they began to reach out for new horizons. They had been delivered to new homes by a couple of hackers who were inspired by the torch of youthful passion and a couple of nine irons spreading The Zoysia from here to Kingdom Come. Love knows no bounds, and neither does Zoysia. Both had been a guiding light, a sign that greener pastures were ahead, on both odd days and evens, at least until next Fall when a new crop of white zoysia would go up in smoke.